Growing up, there were very few things that excited me - a reason for a fist fight, water balloons & kites, cotton candy, Winnie the Pooh, a Fair and a NEW BOOK.
Graduating from the Arabian Nights, Fairly Tales, Peter Pan, and Comics to Tom Sawyer, Oliver Twist, Count of Monte Cristo, Famous Fives, Secret Seven, Ghost Busters, Three Investigators, Mr Meddle, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Goose bumps, Baby sitters, Sweet Valley High, Calvin and Hobbes, Archie Comics, Roald Dahl's Collections... I always had books around me.
To be quite honest my folks never got me into the reading habit... infact I don’t remember how I started reading. I JUST did. That was it. I guess I didn’t see my first Video Games and Play stations until I was well into my teens... and ofcourse then... You had better things to worry than how many cherries should Pacman eat or How Mario would fight grotesque looking toads or which warrior would invade space... I always needed to get rid of some budding pimple, not to mention curl my hair and paint my toe nails black and shorten my school skirt by 2 inches... who had the time to be glued to a 21 inch screen chasing some ducks and diamonds.
I sought solace in books when growing pains were getting too depressing or when my best friend betrayed me and talked to Charlie, whom I hate or when my mother refused to allow me to pierce my navel. I loved reading... I loved the pictures that were painted by Enid Blyton or Ruskin Bond. My creative side esp when I needed to explain the missing cookies and broken vase was inspired solely by them.
Noticing my passion for reading, my darling daddy bought me his first gift of a book to me - 'The Pilgrim's Progress'. I can't say I read it word for word and understood it. But I enjoyed reading it from cover to cover. From thence, I had my parents blessing to simply read.
So a small flirtation with books blossomed into a 200 odd book collection featuring diverse topics, award winning books and authors and best sellers. Even today, I would love to watch the rain, sip tea and curl up reading. Or forget the rain and the tea.. I would love to simply curl up anywhere and read.
I can’t imagine traveling without a few books in my knapsack, hand bag, in my laptop case and one in my lunch bag. At times, I would be reading more than 3-4 books at a time.
But the sad part is I don’t see this madness or 'craze' amongst the people that I am surrounded by. I have many of my older peers who would always stop at my desk to see what book is decorating it... but the newer souls.. .even if a book swatted him/her in the center of the forehead, they wouldn’t blink.
And not helping our cause is the advent of internet and eBooks... I don’t consider eBooks to be books. I mean, what book has pages that cant be turned and the smell of a new book, ahh! The pages all ramrod straight or dog eared... how can that be forgone? Ok, I will make my peace with eBooks but apart from being the first files to be deleted to make space for music or games or some scrabbling or hacking tools, I have never seen anyone actually read them.
My youngest sister thinks I am ancient. 'A few generations apart', she says. She would love to read only if the TV has conked out and its raining outside and all her friends have been abducted by some alien spaceship and the telephone had been banned and sms is charged 1$ per sms and sleeping is SIMPLY not an option. Phew! Hang in there books.. she is going to read you one day!
But despite all the million diversions provided by Sony and Hutch, reading has survived. Recently I viewed a bunch of Resumes and was pleasantly surprised to see many of the freshers just out of college and entering the corporate grind, claim to have an interest in reading or foster a hobby of reading. Giving them the benefit of the doubt and believing that this is a true interest and not words to ornament their resume and influence the ‘serious’ recruiter, I take solace that perhaps reading will be passed on from this generation to gen X or nexgen.
The fast pace of life, the constant pressure of something new all the time, the non-stop imposition of entertainment, the rapid fire of images and videos, the ruckus called hard rock and core rap… don’t you need a reprieve from all this? A quiet time to see words take over your senses, toy with your mind and conjure images of goblins, elves, romance, incredible sci-fi, mystic Wiccan healings, tiding emotions. A time when patience is growing within you as you turn pages to find out about how Francesca Johnson and Richard Kincaid’s love blossoms, or how the Finch kids make friends with Boo Radley or how Estha and Rahel survived their Ammu’s death. A lot of emotions which people would otherwise never feel in their lifetimes are invoked through a few pages of words. You grow with every story, every quote, every word…
We read to know that we are not alone - C S Lewis
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I recently put down the intriguing ‘Beloved witch’ by Ipsita Roy. She writes about being a witch in today’s times and how witch hunting passed her by. I intend to post some parts of the books that struck a chord in me here sometime soon. Now I am reading ‘Mediocre But Arrogant’ by Abhijit Bhaduri– this is on the same lines as ‘Five point Someone’ by Chetan Bhagat and ‘Snapshots from Hell’ by Peter Robinson.
My favorite books remain: 'Ishmael' by Daniel Quinn, 'God of Small things' - Arundhati Roy, 'Namesake' by Jumpa Lehari, 'The Da Vinci Code' by Dan Brown, 'The Bridges of Madison County' by Robert James Waller, 'The Prophet' by Salman Rushdie, 'Veronica decides to Die' by Paulo Coelho.
